Samsung Galaxy S7 release date, news and features

Defeating the Kryptonite of water for smartphones

The Samsung Galaxy S7 is finally official, and while we knew a fair about it in the lead up to the launch, there were still a few surprises on offer that might have surprised a few.

Cut to the chase
What is it? The new flagship phone from Samsung's Galaxy S line.
When is it out? Launch: February 21 (with pre-orders live), release date: March 11
What will it cost? We're still waiting for final prices, but expect it to be the most expensive mainstream Samsung phone ever.

Release date

As you'll have noticed above, the Samsung Galaxy S7 release date has been set for March 11, with pre-orders kicking off the second the new phone was announced.

Some retailers are promising to deliver the phone a little earlier if you pre-order, so it's worth sticking your name on the list if you're going to be buying it early doors anyway.

Price

While we're still waiting for final confirmation on pricing for the UK and US, Australian pricing for the Samsung Galaxy S7 has been announced at AU$1,149 (approx. £574/US$820).

We'll update this section with up to the UK and US pricing as we get it – but in the meantime, best start looking for the things you can get a decent price for on eBay…

Design

The design of the Galaxy S7 looks pretty much like that of the Galaxy S6 – or so you'd think when you first lay eyes on it
The phone, from the front, does have a very similar look, with the metal edges and rounded corners.

But the rear of the phone has been rounded away (think the S6 Edge's front used on the back) in the same manner as the Galaxy Note 5, and it feels completely different.

On top of that, Samsung's brought back the IP68 rating (meaning you can dunk it in 1.5 meters of water for 30 minutes) that we last saw on the Galaxy S5 – but this time, with the more premium design of glass and metal.

It's still a touch chunkier than other phones on the market, but it feels good in the hand and the mix of glass and metal makes it feel like a phone worth spending a decent amount of cash on.

Screen

Samsung's stuck with the same 5.1-inch QHD Super AMOLED display on the Galaxy S7. It's usually a bad thing when a brand doesn't add anything to the mix for its phone from one year to the next (we're talking to you, Apple…) but in this case, last year's screen was so nifty that there's no further it could have gone this year.

Super AMOLED tech means you're already getting great color reproduction and brilliant differences between the light and dark elements of the screen – and the results always seem to impress friends.

The QHD resolution is pin-sharp too, meaning 1440 x 2560 pixels and closing in on a resolution that's so sharp the eye can't ever see the pixels.

It makes pictures and web pages, in particular, look smooth and clear, and as OLED technology is self-emitting, sits closer to the glass too.
Always on display

While the display technology in the Samsung Galaxy S7 hasn't altered much, the way it's being used has.

Samsung's decided that it needs another headline feature, and the Always On Display seems to be it. You can pretty much guess what this is from the name, so whenever the phone is in standby it'll either show a clock, your calendar or some weird pattern.

In fairness to Samsung it does add a level of gloss to the look of the phone, but it does also draw power. The claim is that it's less than 1% per hour, but that still adds up over the course of a day.
Storage

We're still waiting for conformation on the internal storage sizes Samsung will offer with the S7, but it seems that you'll be looking at 32GB of space in most territories.

Considering Samsung offered 64GB and 128GB variants in the past, that doesn't seem like much of an offer. But in reality it's more than enough, thanks to the addition of a microSD card slot in the SIM tray – something Samsung fans have been crying out for over the last 12 months.

However, while Samsung is claiming that the performance of this card will be good (in the Galaxy S5 it really slowed down the gallery when you had loads of photos on it, for instance) there's a slight surprise here: it's not adoptable.

What does that mean? Well, with Android Marshmallow on board the Galaxy S7, in theory Samsung could have used the new Adoptable Storage feature to take that card, encrypt it and make it part of the internal storage, allowing you to install apps and such to it as you would the 'normal' phone – essentially giving you a 288GB phone for not a lot more cash.

Camera

This is an area that Samsung's going to have to do a lot of work with in terms of spending its marketing dollars: the Galaxy S7 has a 12MP camera, down from the 16MP in the Galaxy S6.

While that sounds like a downgrade, in reality it's a big change for the better, thanks to the fact it'll be letting in more light – 25% more, thanks to the 56% bigger pixels being used.

There's also less strain on the processor, as it doesn't have as large file sizes to work with – so taking pictures is faster and sharper.

The autofocus has also been hugely improved, with Samsung's new dual pixel sensor technology offering lightning quick sharpness – it seems to be on a par with what Sony's put together in the Xperia range, so should result in clearer pics even with a shaky hand.

Battery

Power fans will be pleased to find out that Samsung seems to have put a lot more effort into the battery pack with the Galaxy S7 – boosting it up from 2550mAh in the S6 (which was actually a reduction from the S5) to 3000mAh in the Galaxy S7.

While Samsung doesn't have the best track record with power management in its phones, the combination of the improved power management in Android 6 Marshmallow and more mAh to work with could mean we've finally got a long-lasting Galaxy flagship phone.

OS and power

The Galaxy S7 is one of the first Samsung phones to jump to Android 6, which comes pre-installed on the handset.

That's running on top of (likely) the Qualcomm 820 CPU and 4GB of RAM, which means the S7 is able to handle really meaty tasks like stitching together 360-degree video on the fly from the new Gear 360 camera.

Is it too much power? Probably – and here's hoping the new Qualcomm chipset doesn't suffer from the same thermal issues as its predecessor.

Game launcher

The other big feature on show here is the Game Launcher, a sandboxed area where you can store your latest gaming titles you've downloaded and get access to a suite of tools to improve the experience.

For the lower-power games you can shed framerate and processing to save battery, and while in game you can lock the buttons, disable alerts and even record footage of your gaming experience.